


Angelology

by Anonymous



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: X & Y | Pokemon X & Y Versions
Genre: Tags will be updated as the story progresses, angel au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-08 02:16:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was not the first time he had been called upon to walk among the thronging masses of humanity. But in the past, nothing less than God could have hoped to twist and crush the dust and dweomer of his very self into such a shape against his will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dust and Dweomer and the Stuff of Selves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamsdark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsdark/gifts).
  * Inspired by [perfectworld au](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/33912) by dreamydark. 



This was not the first time he had been called upon to fold himself down and small and graceless, and tread among the thronging masses of humanity. He had been required to appear to them before. But, those times were blurred and indistinct with history, memories disused and dry-rotted in the edges of the membranous conglomerate that is the republic of heaven.

He could recall them in perfect clarity if he were so inclined. It would be an easy thing to do, to pull lightly at pinion feathers until the dust was filtered back into the whole of him. But there was no useful reason to do so. Humans were always shifting underfoot anyway, and no lessons learned in one era could possibly be applied to another. The distraction of conflicting memories and input would, if anything, have rendered him less effective. So, when he was made to stand before them, tucking himself down into the barest shade of himself so that he might hope to avoid burning out their souls with his luminance, it was always effectively the first time.

He was not an angel sent before them often, but in the distant days it had not been overly rare, either. He was of the ranks dedicated to beauty. There were others among his cohort who specialized in so many smaller fragments of the divine whole, and he was the overseeing eye that helped to weave them together into aesthetics that would please God, and guide humanity to higher echelons.

Every angel, of course, was made for their purpose. But in the past he had often felt the cool brush of joy that made him all the more certain of the Creator's beneficence. He was suited to his task not merely with perfect skill, but perfect passion. From the most minute grains of sand, each among them an exquisite sculpture, to the jagged dissonance of entire mountain chains, to the careful balance of blank and bright that was the night sky painted into ecstasy above the little human world, all beauty brought him comfort.

And though he was no muse, destined to guide by hand the actions of human agents of this beauty, he had walked among those most particularly talented of them from time to time. When there was a moment's rest, or simply to appreciate the capricious, fleeting gifts they gave. Creation, true and complete conjuring of the before unknown, was the work of God and Man alone.

But Man always aged and rotted and died, as was the human way. And they were chaotic and impossible to predict, as was the way of will. They were erratic flushes of noise and fire, and he appreciated the vivid colors that they swept across the canvas of reality with their sparkling, divine souls, but they were always as ugly as they were wondrous. And when they began to swarm and swell, overspilling into every corner of land and sea, he grew less and less enamored of them.

There were so many more of them than there were angels who might hope to protect and shepherd them. It was impossible for his muses to move about them with the frequency and passion needed to ensure that they were inspired, that they would grow towards the pristine blend of chaos and order that would make them beautiful, and raise them from mundane to deific. And it was not the sole, scrambling panic of his ranks alone. Sooner than not, they outstripped the Guardians, and the Archivists and all the many, faceted tiers of Heaven.

But that did little dissuade him of his opinion that he was suited more than flawlessly to the task set before him. It meant only that there were changes which had to be made to the hierarchy and structure of his cohort. Simple enough. Humanity was forced, by it's sheer population, to a place of devaluation.

Spread thin, his angels began to restrain themselves. Not every glittering bauble of talent could be polished to perfection. They wove their dust-born wings of gold and fire only through the souls that would have the greatest impact, and as more and more of them were born, humanity breeding like rats, the standards came ever higher.

Those who would once have warranted a personal touch, carried on the wind of wings throughout an entire mayfly life were now unworthy. Less than nothing. They were a detriment, and every single one of them wore on the very substance of Lysandre as they died incomplete. They were failures, and he had failed them.

Yet, after enough of them, he began to realize that they could not be his fault, either. Will and freedom meant they, surely, had to be held accountable for their mistakes. For their inferiority.

And the volume of the wasted dying made no real difference, in the grand scheme. There were always more, and more, and more of them. They came in droves, in hoards and legions. They packed themselves in as densely as the land would allow, and then began reaching for the sky. And they kept coming. An infinity, an endless multiplicity of them. Worthless things that could not appreciate the gift of the life they had, squandering it among ever larger generations, all condemned to die in filth. They held inside them the iridescence of the divine, and they _wasted_ it without concern.

There were simply not enough angels. They were of a limited quantity, and with their God in his Heaven refusing to take action, only the rarest selection of humans might join them by rejecting their divine freedom without somehow corrupting the weave of their soul. The last time that had happened was so long ago it barely bore discussion, and these angels born of man were always strange. Their selves were irreparably tinted by individuality, as if they had fallen rather than grown. And perhaps they had. Humanity had once upon a time been intended to rule angels, had they not?

Of course, the fact that Man becoming Angel was all but unheard of _now_ , only added certainty to Lysandre's mind. What had once been above them, to be praised and guarded, had now fallen well beneath the motes of their concern.

There were other ways that God might have stepped from his pedestal and resolved the problem with a single breath across the fabric of existence. If He could not be asked to increase the weight of heaven, then why not simply decrease that of man? Anyone with the basic skills necessary to count and think could see that. But He took no action. He sat and deferred and revealed Himself only to the highest echelons, further than even Lysandre, Angel of Beauty, bearer of Six Wings and Painter of the Tapestry and Kiln of Worlds, was privvy. And the rest of the republic of heaven was left scratching the walls in their attempts to save a world that had tipped over the point of no return millenia ago. Humanity's feral ways threatened to infect and consume all of Heaven with madness.

What the Creator had done was not unlike abandonment, but they were not children. They would find a way.

In the midst of the collapse, humanity began to forget. The voices of those who knew the stories blotted out by the endless cacophony of the millions, and the billions. That there were angels who cared for them became a legend, and then a myth, and then a joke. A field of historical, ethnographic study for only a bare few. And these few were rendered incapable by their own ignorance. An ignorance that there could be no time to rectify, for the minute population of angelologists had not coincided with the bright glint of divine perfection that his muses were to care for in generations untold.

Lysandre, for lack of Order or Choice, or any faith to bear in the world of man, cast his wings wide and sprawling, and concerned himself with overseeing the beauty of the wilds, what few there still were. Let the muses, who were bound to humanity, continue in service to it. He and his lieutenants would take the rest, and let humanity damn itself to filth and ruin.

They, he had begun to realize, deserved nothing more.

The flare-bright muses who obeyed his command drifted in and out of his consciousness as they worked. He paid them no mind directly, but it was the way of the material of Heaven that he, as their superior, was made to know about them regardless. If he wished to pay attention, the information was always there, gleaming at the edges of his vision.

He did not wish it, and turned himself constantly and more deeply towards the beasts and trees and air and sky. In time, it came to pass that the only others to whom he spoke were those high keepers of these places, to supervise and guide their continuing efforts to coax more and greater magnificence from them, in hopeful, distant dreams of preservation.

It took thirty seven _years_ for the muse Mable to break through his vacuous separation, accosting him directly. Were she any other member of the ranks, she would have failed utterly, for she was subordinate to him completely. But Mable was the last of humanity to rise and fall to placid holiness, and she was unnatural in the music of heaven. Her notes were discordant and wild, and still rang of freedom and creation, though she had long ago grown accustomed to the limitless, selfless way of her new existence.

Her message was heard in an instant, in all the depths of detail that could be mustered, but the knowledge was so foreign by then that Lysandre could not understand the warning. She spoke in thoughts and impressions of a human who had been hers, and no longer was. But he had not died. He had progressed beyond what a Muse could channel and cherish.

And in her knowledge of this frail and fleeting man, there came a beacon of alarm. The field of his inspiration was neither art nor drama, numbers nor bricks, nor even the gardens and herds of life itself. _We are his Muses, and we are his Works, in one, together_.

The forewarning was beyond Lysandre's comprehension, spoken in that deferential way of Mable, tinged with divinely human trickery, empty of the cool certainty that suffused him and other of his make.

It came as a surprise, when something clung to his body, warping the flow of the dust and plasma and dweomer that held him, and pulled.


	2. Creation Which Itself Creates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The trouble with mortal tongues and immortal glossaries is, something always gets lost in translation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hover over any given set of enochian gibberish for a translation. Not all translations will be given in-text. A glossary of terms used can be found at [my tumblr](http://vergess.tumblr.com/tagged/angelology%20glossary) if hover text is disabled on your broswer. It contains spoilers. You may test your hovertext compatibility by placing your cursor over these notes.

Augustine Sycamore was a very busy man. He hadn't been a busy man for most of his life, however, and was not especially adept at managing it. For example, though the tech department with the Université Sud-Lumiose assured him there was a way to force calls to his cellphone to route through to his voicemail box with the school, barring a whitelist of personal contacts, no one had ever managed it. He now carried two phones with him at all times: his old, public number attached to the one that he left turned off, and his new phone with its jealously guarded private number left on.

This plan was excellent in theory, but in practice, he was constantly forgetting to actually check the private phone, and the only way anything got done was through his research assistant's intervention. Sonia didn't have the same seamless knack for reminding the Professor of his responsibilities that Mable had managed, but she was certainly a life saver for a man drowning in his own accidental fame.

There were something like sixteen practicing Angelologists with high level degrees in the field, which was dying out slowly. A peculiar old religion, long dead, and with few cultural after effects not better studied by a broader ethnographic historian. But Professor Sycamore was something of a special case. Or rather, the Chrysanthemum Chronologies, a series of films which his childhood friend produced and headlined, and in which he was featured as a main writer, were a special case.

He had never considered himself a talented writer. His inability to string sentences together without them sounding dangerously like he was talking, filler words, pet names and all, had been one of his largest problem points during his studies. But when it came to speaking about the Tiered Heaven and the Hierarchy of Angels, he was like a man possessed. Admittedly, Sina, Dexio, and their shared flair for the dramatic- and for dialogue that wasn't painfully archaic and technical- were responsible for coaxing his drafts into proper plots worth selling to the modern viewer. But the scripts were still undoubtedly his work. His overly detailed retellings of what little of the Heraldic Parables remained, and his alone.

Ever since they'd proven a financial success- with the fourth now in production- Sycamore's life had become something of a mess.

It was little surprise to anyone that he nearly didn't receive the consultation request at all. Sonia had been reminding him to check his phone twice a day for the last three, but he'd kept getting waylaid by lectures and research for his newest paper during the workday, and after hours the last thing he wanted was to talk about angels. Unless, of course, it was to make horrifying Unovan folk song puns as a way of charming people at the bar.

When he finally _had_ gotten around to it, and heard from the anthropological team studying the Alph Ruins of Hoenn, it was especially uninteresting. The ruins, while fascinatingly inexplicable, happily pre-dated the Heraldic religion by at least a handful of centuries. And even if there was something angelologically worthwhile there, they were also within only a few hours travel of the esteemed Doctor Birch, a much more respectable member of the minute angelic cohort. The professor had almost dismissed it out of hand.

But the voicemail was followed by a few grainy photo messages of relief etchings in the wall of a recently opened chamber, and that had been the deciding factor.

He'd asked Sonia to delay every appointment and consultation and anything else in the world really that might have required his attention and could feasibly be delayed. And then, he had thrown himself into the excavation completely. Or at least as completely as one could, given the distance and the time differences. He had been teleconferencing the team at unholy hours of the morning, and thus going to bed almost before sunset. Also, drinking so much coffee to counter the schedule change that he had been forced to drag his press out of its hiding place (in the linen closet, for reasons he could not recall) and start making it himself, or risk burning through his checking account.

There had always been etchings of peculiar glyphs in the Ruins. They were associated with ancient local mythologies, and it was an accepted fact that they were probably stylizations of an extinct pokémon. One with an astonishing amount of variation in its physiology, but with enough commonality- the central, enormous eye- to be regarded as variations on a theme rather than related but differing lines. Not unlike Vivillon, though rather more dramatic.

The most widely published photo of the interior of the Ruins of Alph was a sort of chart. A grid of five rows and six columns, holding twenty eight glyphs in a precise nonrepeating order, with two empty spaces on either side of the final row.

The glyphs- no one called them letters, except for the fact that _everyone_ did, but only informally of course- depicted in it were infamous, and for very good reason. They were obviously recognizable to any onlooker native to one of the western regions. An alphabet. Not just _an_ alphabet. The Murexic alphabet. The one that had served as the root to all of the Western languages, save the aboriginal tongues still spoken in the regions south of Unova, and the handful of slowly dying native speakers of the matching Northern languages in the Dualum region.

The _modern_ Murexic alphabet.

There was no known reason for even the Syracusian and Gaml-delt Murexic alphabets to be in a Hoennite ruin that had been built before any historically significant cultural contact between the regions had occurred. Certainly not contact regular and influential enough to cause the construction of a veritable _shrine_ to the language, and far, far less than enough for some sort of accelerated parallel evolution. The only explanations anyone had so far were murky conjectures based around psycho-telemetry in the extinct pokémon.

This chart, however, while similar, was not at all the same. The grid had the same five-by-six layout, but its two empty spaces were in the third row, with the entire fourth left blank. Suggestive at first glance of the room being incomplete when construction had ceased.

The Alph team had called not for an etymologist or an anthropological engineer, but an angelologist. A simple doubletake revealed why. Those glyphs, with their enormous central eyes staring out like passive judges of the empty world around them, _were not Murexic_.

Pa. Veh. Ged. Gal. Orh. Und. Graph. Twenty two sigils, stylized but legible, in precise alphabetical order, only mirrored, as Hoennite things often were from a Western perspective.

 _Enochian_.

Had it been any wonder that he'd practically closed himself off from the world? This was an unmatched opportunity, and because of the popularity of Diantha's films- which he still insisted on thinking of them as, even as she kept calling them his- it was _his_ opportunity alone. Not even Birch, only a few hours drive away, knew of it.

He hadn't been out of his office for anything but sleep in almost three weeks now, and as often as not he drifted off while sitting up. Sonia kept bringing him sandwiches and staring at him for longer and longer intervals of time. Sooner or later, she was going to drag him away from his work by force, and before that happened, he wanted to be ready.

Publish or perish was the siren song of any academic, particularly one in a dying, specialist field. But publication was irrelevant to him just yet. Because every day, new passages were uncovered in the ruins, carefully photographed at absurd resolutions, and sent to him for translation, analysis. Sent to him to _read_ , not only for the words but the phrases, the implications. The Everic language was not a widely understood one. It showed all the markers of being a made language, rather than an evolved one, and every piece written in it assumed that the reader knew things that the readers, in this case, obviously did not.

It was designed for a high-context culture, where everyone shared the same thoughts and ideas. Not unlike the Kanton language family he'd learned while studying under Dr Rowan several years ago. And given the Heraldic Church's common belief that Angels were creatures of insubstance who spoke from soul to soul, free of the limitations inherent to mind and body, that was to be expected.

Every character and group of characters had a meaning not only formed by the order of the glyphs, but the surrounding glyphs, and the numbers of glyphs, and on and on. And with most of the referential texts the Church had created for translating the “Divine Word” lost to the ravages of time and disfavour, translation was a tricky, constant guessing game.

But, much like his writings in the Chrysanthemum Chronologies, the Professor had always had something of a talent for it. More than once, he'd impressed both his own peers and easily swayed young men and women at bars and clubs by composing unique sentences in the bizarre guttural-sybillant tongue with an unnatural ease. There was something to be said for lips that could wrap themselves around the networked fractal of implicit meaning flawlessly. Not that the people he was seducing ever really understood that. They just enjoyed the novelty of it. But the few others in his field were certainly shocked by the grammatical perfection of his constructions, which often took hours to unravel, but which were never mistaken.

The last time he'd used that particular talent, the Unovan pair he'd been hosting- Fennel and someone-or-other, Sonia would know, she'd worked with them hadn't she?- had cooed over him for hours. It had been the precise sort of humiliating praise that always sank into one's bones in the way casual compliments, no matter how frequent, could not.

But there was only so far he could get on raw talent alone, and he seemed to have reached his limit. The texts were dense, the constructions unfamiliar, and his natural skill for thinking in the broad informational clouds that the language was designed to work in kept hitting up against harsh walls.

He suspected, from what he had unraveled of the first passage, that this was a new piece of mythology all together. A completely lost tale, now rediscovered. And, given the fact that the rest of the Ruins of Alph discussed, in various levels of detail, the rituals by which one could contract the ancient legendary pokémon of the region- two birds that were clearly cultural crossover from the nearby Kanto, and three lions or possibly dogs that were likely more native- he had every reason to assume this was a similar offering. Nothing in Enochian was ever in a vacuum. If the Hoennite-Murexic parts of the tombs were communication rituals, then the Enochian nearly certainly was as well.

But beyond that, none of it made any sense.

He stared at the latest photographs, printed out on legal paper so that he could scribble all over them with his felt tipped pens, until his eyes began to water.

He hadn't even noticed he was falling asleep. Why would he have? Mable had always been around, there was no reason why she shouldn't be here now, looking down at him with her particular gift for amusement and judgment, and opening her mouth to speak with only the sound of falling trees coming out. Perfectly sensible.

He jumped back into startled awareness, heart in his throat and ink staining his forehead, when the entire desk shook under Mable's words, which had shifted to sound much like business casual pumps pounding on a softwood desk.

“Come on, get up,” He could smell cheap, burnt coffee and he stared at the pot uncomprehendingly, while it politely poured itself into a cup. No, wait. That wasn't right. He attempted to ask the coffee how it was doing that, and failed. “You have to go deal with Travers's little madhouse. You know how they fawn over you.”

His interloper shoved acid-coffee into his hands and kindly wrapped his fingers around the cup for him while he tried to figure out what was going on. “Merci, merci, ma chère, you are a beacon of hope in trying times.”

It was too hot to be drunk properly, but he inhaled it deeply, willing the synapses in his brain to kick on through reflex.

“Whatever you say, <Professor,>” Oh! The Unovan pronunciation- the Unovan accent really- finally cut through the fog of his head. Interloper! Nonsense, this was only Sonia, come to rescue him again. “Now get up, before I have to find a riding crop and lead you around like a stubborn pony.”

“If only, my dearest, if only,” He smiled his best smile for her, blinking a few too many times. But, he knew from long experience, that would look less like exhaustion and more like a joke, paired with his grin. It worked wonders on people.

He took as long a sip of the hot coffee as he could manage and promptly choked on it when Sonia slapped his shoulder. Well, it worked wonders on people he didn't spend every day with, anyway. Mable had never particularly bought into it either. Nor Diantha, not since secondary school. And it had only really been effective on Sina and Dexio for the first half of the first film. He would have considered writing a note to himself to find different charming smiles for the select few, if there hadn't been another resounding bang of foot on desk that had him jumping out of his chair as much as his skin.

“Coming, Mable, I'm coming!” He shushed her, scuttling around the desk warily. “Who am I speaking with ag-”

She shoved an enormous folder of stapled packets under his arm and herded him out of the office. “Travers's departmental intro lecture? You know, the reason she keeps signing _my_ paychecks? I realize you and your Chrysanthemums are fine, but some of us do actually need you to do your job.”

She didn't sound particularly angry, but that might have been because it was an old argument that had been worn down into a soft and familiar cadence. The door slammed shut behind him and he blinked blearily for a moment, alone in the corridor and at a loss, before recalling in which auditorium the Introduction to Anthropological Studies lecture was held and making his way there. Every step stretched out his cramped muscles further, forcing him to wake up.

He was still exhausted, but at least by the time he made his way to the well lit podium he could feel the familiar weight of his life's work slipping around his shoulders comfortably. It was enough to help suppress the urge to lie down somewhere dark and not move for a while. Until the Alph team called in the early hours at least, or maybe even until the actual sunrise.

Two hundred and eight people streamed in the six doors of the auditorium. He knew the number because every single seat was full, with another eight standing against the back wall. It wasn't an unusually large number for a department-mandated introductory course with multiple speakers, but a full attendance rate from a bunch of first and second year students was still something to be proud of. He put on his finest interview smile, the one Diantha had taught him. It put just enough tension around his eyes to make sweeping them back and forth across an audience- or into a camera- look like briefly held eye contact with them all.

“Good afternoon,” He began. Like clockwork, they chanted his greeting back, and he launched into a lecture that he'd only half prepared- too much time spent on the Alph project. But he did well with improvisation, and it wasn't as if he was going to be fielding a large number of extremely complex questions.

Every once in a while, as the projection slides behind him changed with a gesture to the A/V operator, the entire room was filled with the quiet rustle of hundreds of pages being turned simultaneously.

It was not an especially intense lecture. At the end, the usual Q&A with the usual questions (and answers). Pronunciations, which he guided the entire auditorium through as one looming voice. Excessively precise requests for dates which had no doubt come directly from the quiz packets that Sonia had given him. Giggling requests for his contact information, which he answered with the familiar Office Hours Only response. And, as ever, there was always one who thought they could wrangle spoilers out of him, because they were still ultimately children and some of them knew him as a celebrity, not a professor. For those, he had always the same words.

“ _Oiad londoh ol ollor g'chis'ge ln-bar, nostoah oiad luciftian ol lorsl teloc oe oiad affa_.” The tagline on the frames of the posters, which he had ultimately demanded his old teacher Dr Rowan read for the trailers, when the usual narrators mangled the pronunciations. Diantha had tried to force him to do it, but he had too much nose in his voice to be recorded, really. “And if you can't outlast a single flower, then how are you going to sit through an entire film?”

As always, amused chuckling, and then dismissal.

Having been pulled away from the translations for as long as he had, Sycamore almost believed he was thinking clearly for once. He ought to thank Sonia for putting up with him. Maybe take her to a nice meal, before collapsing into his own bed instead of an office chair, and bidding farewell to codices and contextual grammatical structures. Leave them for his future self to deal with, he wanted to be lazy and pointless for a while.

He had just knocked on the door of Sonia's postage stamp of an office to ask exactly how much he should be spending on dinner to retain her favor, when he froze completely, staring into the middle distance. The door opened underneath his knuckles. Sonia stared up at him anxiously, mouth moving. He distantly recognized that was happening.

“<Professor,> are you listeni-”

“Mab- Sonia, ma belle Sonia, I have an extremely important question which only you can answer, and if you do it well, I will not only buy you dinner-”

“What under the sun are y-”

“-but an entire vacation back to Unova for the summer to see your family. If I said to you-”

“-talking about? What dinner- < _wait, wait,_ vacances _is a vacation, right? >_”

“ _Telloc od ln-bar oe ollar ol ooanoan_ , what would you translate that as? Quickly, quickly, the plainest way you can say it!”

At some point he had grabbed her shoulders, and he realized belatedly that she was staring at him with wide eyes, fingers twitching towards his arms and dropping. She had clearly decided he'd cracked under some unknown pressure. Uncertain if she was correct, he cleared his throat and let her go gently, schooling the wild energy out of his eyes, and settling a slow smile onto his face.

“This is about those photos on your desk, right? The Hoenn thing?” She offered tentatively, words all very carefully delineated from each other rather than flowing, and he suspected it was only partly the Unovan accent. He nodded slowly, modulating his gestures even though he was buzzing on the edge of something, he could feel it.

“Well its, uh,” She began, nerves slowly fading out of her expression to be replaced with a plainer confusion and no small amount of annoyance. “You're the translation expert here, you know. But it's. Forgotten is the land of the dead in the eyes of man?”

She sounded like a young student asking their teacher if an answer was right, after having been made to stand in front of the class and recite. “Yes! Well no, it's forgotten! But it isn't, because the action inflected subject- it's _abandoned_! Turned away from our eyes to die in the transient kingdoms of man!”

He nearly turned tail then and there, intent on taking this novel realization to his office to work through the evening again. He really would have, except that Sonia, small and stern and unforgiving, had grabbed his wrist in obvious payback for his earlier assault, and was glaring at him in a way that reminded him ominously of his _own_ tenure in primary school.

“I don't know what you think you're about to do, but you aren't. I believe you just said you are, in fact, taking me to dinner before you,” She huffed, shrugged, and started leading him down the hall in the wrong direction, away from his charts and pens and references. “Before you vibrate apart into _lucifitian lorelsq apachanna_.”

Ever since coming to work under him, Sonia had grown increasingly wary of actually speaking Enochian, which he'd gradually realized was because she was ashamed of her inability to stitch it together as he could. But everyone knew 'light/flowers/dust.' It was the phrase that the Everic language assigned to Angels as a whole.

“You're going to abandon your _self_ to death in the kingdoms of man at this rate. Come on, you're paying so I can afford therapy after dealing with you.”

“Sonia, you know they didn't believe people _actually became-_ ”

“< _Zekrom give me strength. Professor,_ > if you give me the seventeen year old freshfaced first year student tone, I will actually slap you. Come and feed me.”

It was a pleasant enough meal.

It was a little alarming that she followed him home afterwards and sat in his living room until he fell asleep, but behind all the jokes about impropriety, he really was grateful that she cared enough to bother. Particularly when he spent half his time calling her by the wrong name.

Still, he was too agitated to sleep properly, and after what felt like only a few hours, he filtered back to awareness, his home dark and silent. Left to his own devices, well fed and partly rested, what was there to do but toddle out to the rarely used computer beneath the living room window and return to work?

The cocktail of exhaustion and excitement left him wavering on the line between inspiration and unconsciousness for quite some time, before the stinging behind his eyes became intolerable. Just one more word, he promised himself every time. One more. But of course each word changed all those preceding, and eventually he blinked, failed to open his eyes, and slumped emptily over the keyboard.

When he woke again just before dawn to the incessant chirping of his phone, he couldn't even feel that bad about the way his shoulders burned or he'd filled a sixty five page word document with v's, and probably had a matching bruise on his forehead.

The communique today was just photos, plenty of them, and to his exceptional delight the strings of characters unwound themselves easily to his gaze. There was a text message from Sonia, informing him that she had called him in sick and canceled his one student appointment for the day.

He would need to buy her flowers. Hundreds and hundreds of flowers and feathers and dust, gold dust, where did someone even buy gold dust? Probably the internet?

But for now, for this moment, he needed to go to the store for some rather more mundane things. Anthropology was a humanitarian study, but it was still a study, and he could hardly help himself. He felt very nearly as if the inscriptions had been meant for him, though he knew somewhere in his gut that was unbelievably stupid. They were millennia old, and obviously intended for only the highest tiers of the long dead church. But then again, what were he and his colleagues if not the _only_ remaining tier of the church?

It wasn't as if rosewater, cream of tartar, and corn flour were very hard to get a hold of. They would have been _then,_ though. Intricate riches reserved for an elite class of man. Corn flour, for example. This was a pre-Unovan inscription, corn hadn't even existed, as far as the Church knew. But there were only so many conclusions he could reach for 'eat/dust/gold/wheat/grass/new land.' It was such a detailed description, unusual for Enochian, and it had jumped out at him immediately. Thorough definitions like that were so rare.

And if he was wrong- _of course he was wrong,_ he wasn't a fanatic, he knew he was wrong, he knew it- then he'd make some very peculiar muffins afterwards and give them to Sonia, who always delighted in things which tasted of flow- no, wait. That was Mable again.

Well, he'd put it in a spray bottle then, and make his house smell lovely, and bake plain muffins. The plans and backup plans and self-censoring thoughts all crowding around his skull managed to block out one particular fact of note.

It was five thirty in the morning, and none of the shops were open.

He wandered around the city, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Waiting for what? This was unbelievably stupid. Sonia had been right to worry, he was clearly fracturing apart under the strain. What was he going to do with cream of tartar- _chalk/vinegar/wine/remnant: lulo_ \- and rose water- _flower/royalty/creation/tincture: torzulc'homa_ \- and his own blood- _blood: cnila; adherent/son-of/gift/inspiration: mad nanaeel_? Nothing, he wasn't going to do anything, because he wasn't a fanatic and he wasn't in a cult and he wasn't delusioned as to the existence of metaphysical gods that ancient men had depended on to avoid going mad in the face of their own mortality.

He was an academic, and a philosopher, and he wasn't afraid of dying, exactly. Just of not living enough first. He should go home. He should go to sleep.

At eight o clock, the first of the larger supermarkets opened, and he bought everything anyway. He also left with a rotisserie chicken that was definitely from the day before, but which his stomach refused to let him go without. Besides, if he was going to be bloodletting, he'd need it. Bloodletting. He was struck with the ridiculous image of himself in a long white labcoat, cackling over unknowable beakers and surrounding by humming machines and blinking lights, like a mad scientist.

He preferred his grey topcoat, it was easier to keep clean.

Although, perhaps not from blood stains?

The walk home was long; he'd been wandering for hours. But he traveled at a meditative pace, grocery bag on one elbow, and hypnotized by the rhythm of his feet. It seemed as if it had been no time at all, as he stared down at the wooden salad bowl he'd gotten from his mother over the holidays a few years ago. He had yet to use it for serving salads, although it had been a punchbowl once.

Currently, it looked like the beginnings of a cake. Equal parts corn flour and rose water, radiating a suffocatingly strong perfume that he idly considered would sink into his soul, and leave him smelling like roses for the rest of his life. Silly.

He scattered the cream of tartar over the cake-dough looking mess, jaw clenching against the horrible grating squeak it made between his fingers. He wasn't entirely certain how much there was supposed to be. The glyphs had only said to create a 'snowfall fit for the lowest desert,' which was entirely unhelpful. But he stopped when he felt like stopping, the little Mable-voice that relaxed in the back of his mind tapping at his metaphorical shoulder like someone else's instinct in his own hand.

The blood had been even more poorly described. It hadn't really been described at all. Frankly, he wasn't even sure it was meant to be his own blood anymore. He wasn't an adherent, and the use of the gift-phrase put him in a mind of ancient church-bound slaves, which when it came to Enochian was probably not accidental.

Before he could think himself out of it, he took a paring knife to the outside edge of his left hand. It didn't even hurt, at first, presumably something about nerves and shock. He wasn't exactly that kind of doctor. Anatomy he understood vaguely enough, but biology was rather beyond his expertise. By the time his blood was slipping into the bowl, stringing through the dry white powder and creating little beads that revealed the flower-flour below, the slit _burned_ and he regretted making that large a cut viciously.

And now, he stared, hand throbbing and stinging, and tried to recall the precise words. But they would not come. He could have stood, and collected his notes, but that felt disingenuous to the spirit of the- what was this even? A ritual? An experiment? A delusion? How could one be disingenuous towards a delusion?

Well, he was the effective head of the field in improvised enochian.

He swallowed thickly, and began.

“Lucifitian loreslq appachana, ol turbs ol oliad.” Angel, that is the beauty of that-which-Creates, “Odo'olora, commah ol ollar eoi ednaz eai cordziz,” and also the freedom of humanity, yet bound and governed now by man, “gaha ol eophon cr'cr'g,” you are made obedient by my pain, regret, lamentation, “odo tabaord ol ohorela,” until released by my order. “Olani oai gassagan,” I am of the divinity which creates itself, “Ol darbs,” and you will obey.

As for where the final phrase came from, he could not say. He knew only that it must have been a name, or a title, because he could remember that he was meant to specify who he wished to contract. He heard it over-layered in his thoughts, and supposed it must have been from some old text he'd half forgotten, read back to him now in a curious cross of Mable and Sonia's voices. His assistants, assisting.

“Turbs goaanu. Iophiel. Odo'olora.” The beauty of creation, the choirmaster, the act of freeing a man.

Nothing happened.

He tried very hard not to feel achingly disappointed. Then again, he had real enough aches. His cramping stomach demanding food after walking all over the city. His burning hand, which he had just slit open in a fit of religious fervor. His stiff back, spiting him for refusing to sleep in his bed.

He cupped his free hand beneath the oozing cut, and stood. Sink first, then bandages, then food, then maybe a bath, but definitely bed afterwards. He hoped the cut wasn't too deep.

“Zomdv oado'rehla raclir.” The man in the black suit informed him, voice perfectly flat, which seemed rather odd given the aggressive set of his shoulders. Almost as if the congealed strings of light blooming from him had weight, and he was compensating.

“My grammar is perfectly exc-ce-laah?” He trailed off slowly, took a very deep breath, and screamed so loudly and with such complete intensity that he entirely forgot he had lungs until they were stuttering and empty.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know where I'm going with this. Somewhere fascinating, hopefully. Also I'm posting these things raw, so they're probably very gross and typo riddled.


End file.
